When I was growing up in a middle-class, Midwestern, mid-century family, I knew only one lawyer, my parents’ solo-practitioner friend Cyril Gross.
Gross joined us for holiday dinners, and every few years my father consulted him professionally on small, Uncontentious matters of probate or property. Gross was a genial bachelor with a sense of humor and a sardonic glint in his eye that made him a little intimidating.
He kept up with world news and knew what was going on in our city; that made him a welcome guest for my civic- minded and intellectually inclined father. Even as a child, I could tell that Gross was more sophisticated than most of the adults I knew, but he fitted in seamlessly with the civil servants and small business people in our circle of the Milwaukee Jewish community. In fact, he was a small business person, nothing more and nothing less, who lunched at Benjy’s Delicatessen to shoot the breeze, over corned-beef sandwiches, with the insurance brokers and furniture dealers who were his clients.This is a book about legal ethics that focuses on the lawyer’s role in enhancing or assaulting human dignity. That may sound like an awfully grandiose way to describe professionals like Cyril Gross whose activities are usually pretty mundane, and which have to do with money far more often than dignity. Isn’t it only a small handful of lawyers - heroic defenders of the downtrodden - whose job consists of fighting for human dignity?
Not really. Although lawyers who fight for human rights certainly deserve admiration, fighting for dignity is not the only way of enhancing it. Lawyers are the primary administrators of the rule of law, the point of contact between citizens and their legal system. Lawyers like Cyril Gross make law’s empire run (or not) on the ground. If the rule of law is a necessary condition for human rights and human dignity, lawyers in all fields will play a vital role in securing these goods. And the ethical character of the legal profession - the commitment of lawyers to the rule of law and the human dignity it helps secure - will determine whether the rule of law is anything more than a slogan.